The AI and Machine Learning Revolution Is Coming for Content Marketing

Marketing technology has evolved rapidly over the past decade, with one of the most exciting developments being the creation of publicly-available, cost-effective cognitive APIs by companies like Microsoft, IBM, Alphabet, Amazon and others. These APIs make it possible for businesses and organizations to tap into artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technology for both customer-facing solutions as well as internal operations.

According to Stratistics MRC, the Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) market is expected to grow to 7.6 billion dollars by 2023. The impact AI/ML will have on businesses over the long-term promises to be revolutionary.

Authoring Efficiencies Powered by AI and ML

The current application of AI and ML in content management is more akin to power-assisted steering than a self-driving car. You remain in the driver’s seat, but you now have an enhanced set of tools to deploy.

These tools make it possible to automate routine operational tasks, freeing you and your team up to focus on higher-value, innovative marketing strategies, such as nurturing your audience, growing your business, and tapping your digital channels to create highly-engaged customers and brand advocates. 

We’ve identified three specific areas within content marketing that are primed for the application of AI and ML technology: content tagging using classification models, faceted image search using image processing (face and object detection), and chatbot-enabled CMS workflow (natural language processing and speech-to-text).

Organizations invest millions of dollars in staff, software, platforms and more, all in an effort to create valuable content. But historically they haven’t been able to fully tap into the potential of that existing content. Imagine being able to unlock that potential in the hundreds of thousands of webpages, blog posts, case studies and other digital content you have by making them easily searchable and sortable.

Off-the-shelf AI/ML tools can help you enrich your content and make it more accessible. For example, content authors usually spend a great deal of time combing through previous posts and existing taxonomy to ensure the tags they apply to a content item are accurate and in line with the current content structure. Furthermore, with the natural churn that occurs in most businesses and organizations, this experience and knowledge can often get lost as employees leave.

Businesses can train AI/ML on their unique, niche taxonomy by having it sift through thousands of your content items to gain contextual knowledge. It can then auto-tag future posts with a higher accuracy rate, allowing your authoring team to focus on creating more content. With better taxonomy, you can serve up more relevant content to your audiences when they are visiting your websites or other digital properties, further helping to enhance their user journey and customer experience. 

An AI/ML investment like this will pay for itself as it continues to learn over time and become a storehouse of institutional knowledge.

Unlock the Value of Your Media Library

If you and your team works with a lot of rich media and a complex media library, then you recognize the need for image auto-tagging. Sorting through thousands of images to find the perfect one to enhance your content can be extremely cumbersome and time-consuming.

The standard image-processing capabilities in today’s AI/ML technologies make it possible to analyze an image and identify colors, objects, people and even their emotional state, gender and estimated age. The right images matched to the right content or campaign can make all the difference in catching your audiences’ attention and increasing engagement.

Let’s take an A/B test that you might want to run on a new promotion, or a personalized hero component on your home page. By nature of their purpose, these kinds of marketing automation tactics require plenty of content variations (including the involved images) to be effective. Now scale this example to cover all the promotions you might be running at any given time or all the personalized components across your site. Identifying the necessary images to serve up across them can become extremely tedious, creating a bottleneck to rolling out new campaigns.

Using an…

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